Samuel Van Dam was a painter long before he studied architecture at two of the Northeast’s most venerated educational institutions: Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In MH+D’s March feature, “The Effects of Careful Observation,” Van Dam delves into the art of architecture and the architecture of art.
Van Dam remembers holding a paintbrush at the tender age of five-years-old. By just ten-years-old he had already sold his first painting. Van Dam’s father, a pioneering doctor in the field of anesthesiology, was an avid artist and his first true teacher. Eventually, Van Dam also studied under Toshi Katayama (then director of Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Art) and with the sculptor Michio Ihara, a fellow at M.I.T.’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies.
Van Dam’s Three Favorite Artists…and Why
1) “Paul Cezanne’s painting for its gravity.”
2) “Henry Moore’s sculpture for its nobility.”
3) “And Alberto Giacometti. To understand why I am so fascinated with Giacometti’s work you must read his biography by James Lord.”
Today, Van Dam still paints for pleasure, but also continually leans on his art education—and artistic instincts—as he approaches a new house project. In the earliest stages of designing a new home, Van Dam will visit the untouched property with his sketch pad in hand. He makes pages of drawings, capturing the trees and rocks, the light and slant of the land; sometimes a landscape architect joins him; maybe even an interior designer. “The plan is generated from the site,” says Van Dam with a tone of finality. Those early sketches, no matter how rough, inevitably inform his final design.
Van Dam believes drawing is an essential tool for thinking—the movement of the hand, he says, sparks a connection in the mind. Drawing is a phase of home design that he relishes. Van Dam says observing a landscape so closely so as to “record” it is both intense and relaxing. “I take as much pleasure in drawing as I do in seeing the actual manifestation.”
With over thirty years of experience designing home’s for Maine’s unforgiving climate, Van Dam has learned to trust his artistic eye. “We absorb a huge amount of what makes us who we are at a very young age,” says Van Dam, “and I know that my core being is in the world of art.”
Van Dam’s Reading Picks:
Four Books on Architecture and One on Art
1) A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
2) Architecture Without Architects by Bernard Rudofsky
3) A View of the Campidoglio by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
4) Modern Movements in Architecture by Charles Jenks
5) Giacometti: A Biography by James Lord
Joshua Bodwell, Associate Editor
